Cosmic troubadour David Gans opens for hot jam wizards Boris Garcia on four California dates this week.
Thursday, November 5, 9:45pm: Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut Street, San Francisco
Friday, November 6: Harvest Hoedown – Willits Center for the Arts, 71 E Commercial Street, Willits CA
Saturday, November 7, 9:30pm: Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA
Sunday, November 8: Humboldt Brews, 856 10th Street, Arcata CA. 707-826-2739

Boris Garcia and David Gans Northern California Tour

Hi Greg,
Broke down and bought Revolver at Borders the other night.  Listened down three times, and here is my report:
1. It’s clean and clear, but no improvement whatsoever over my 1982 British-press vinyl release on Parlophone.  That’s not to say it isn’t great, but that pressing from ‘82 was always the one to beat, to my ears.
2a. The big advantage of digital technology is not clarity, but dynamic range.  Analog can be (and typically is) perfectly clear and defined, but has limits, especially in the case of vinyl as compared to tape, with big shifts from soft to loud.  The CD, when it came out, was touted as being able to accurately reproduce the dynamic flow that is present in all great music.  Instead, it quickly became a “convenient” and “portable” medium.  The compression that had to be used on records to make them fit (on vinyl) was transferred, intact, to CDs.  Occasionally you will find artists and producers, like Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who understand and exploit this aspect of digital, but generally it has become the norm to use a lot of compression– because it has a certain sound, the sound of pop music on the radio.
2b. Revolver, and I’ll wager, all the rest of the Beatles remasters, is highly compressed.  Bummer.  Tomorrow Never Knows, Good Day Sunshine, And Your Bird Can Sing, Eleanor Rigby– should breathe with the dynamics of live performance.  Instead, they are crystal-clear but canned.  This a too bad.  The same team that did a great job on Let It Be…naked, which is a step in the right direction dynamically, did these remasters, but all they’ve achieved is to make them sound like first-press vinyl.  Again, there is nothing “wrong” with that, but it is so much less than it could be. They could have put us in the room with the Beatles.  Instead, here we are in 2009, listening the Beatles on the radio, the DJ spinning a very good pressing.  Just like old times.

by Gregory M. Kerwin

Mourning Lux Interior, lead weirdo of the Cramps, who died Wednesday at 60. The Cramps were a mainstay on the turntable at the Valencia Street Home for Wayward Boys. I saw them once, quite enough, at the On Broadway in 1980, a nice place in SF with a real stage. I saw them with Kid Congo Powers on lead guitar, one of the founders of Gun Club, who joined them on the Psychedelic Jungle album, their greatest. Powers was invited in after a show in New York where the Cramps had turned off the lights and lined the front of the stage with lit candles. Kid got too close and ignited his hairspray. The band pulled him up on the stage to pat his hair out and discovered he wasn’t just an ardent fan – he was Kid Congo Powers. After that the Cramps had to get him into the band. They never played with a bass. Lux, well over six feet tall, skinny, paper white, had on tight black leather pants and no shirt. He had a huge coal-black pompadour sprayed high over his head. He sweated throughout the show and the hairspray wilted until the hair was hanging down in his face. His dance and performance look borrowed a lot from Iggy Pop, writhing and snaky, but Lux had a great rock n roll voice that could do anything he wanted. His wife Poison Ivy played rhythm guitar. She had on a mini-skirt and a push-up bodice, ripped fishnet hose, needle-pointed boots and a permanent sneer, chewing gum with a smirk through the entire show, kicking adoring punk Johnnies in the head if they got too close to where she was standing at the edge of the stage. The drummer was Knick Knox, whose kit was one snare, one cymbal, and the kickdrum. The laziest drummer ever, he spent the entire show eyeballing everybody in the audience, smoking incessantly, keeping time with one hand and the kickdrum. He kept his other hand busy with the cigarette, spare foot propped up on the cymbal stand. Knox had a toy bat suspended on a rubber band from the front of the kickdrum that would bounce in rhythm whenever he’d hit the drum. Lux did his famous one-man vocal car crash – he deep-throated the mic, and while the rest of the band took a break Lux created an entire tableau of screeching tires, shredding sheet metal and crunching windshields with mouth and throat noises, the mic wire snaking out of his mouth while he swam around stage, flapping and waving his long arms like a huge cadaverous pterodactyl. One of a kind, excellent singer actually, a completely committed entertainer, funny all the time, funny as hell, spooky and just the coolest. Always.

January 22, 2009 – Berkeley, California: Rubber Souldiers live at Ashkenaz.  Three guys in front, Lorin Rowan, David Gans and Chris Rowan,  singing their hearts out and throwing down the jam.  It’s the Beatles catalog, songs everybody knows, but this is different.  This is deconstruction– shifting time signatures, riffs morphing into improvised rivers of tone, a hail of electric guitars join mandolins where pianos once played, but always that great singing.  This is the Rowan Brothers folks, with their new brother David, and those boys got the pipes.  The audience is up and dancing four bars into the first song, the driving Dr. Robert.  Rubber Souldiers they are, and plenty of 1965 is here: Girl, The Word, Norwegian Wood.  N-Wood shows what this band can do, departing from the original but always finding the handle again and giving us our Beatle kicks.  Zac Matthews, late of Hot Buttered Rum, joined in here, in fact wrote the arrangement, and lays in some ripping mando leads along with brother Lorin.  As the night grew deeper, darker, we felt the mood expand, and by the time they came through with the cosmic Day Tripper to close out the evening, we knew we had seen the beginning of something big.

Souldiers captured at Ashkenaz 1/22/09

IMG_4208 steve goodman jim and david

Originally uploaded by Look.

David Gans and Jim Rothermel rock the house on Steve Goodman’s “Elvis Imitator,” part of a touching and informative reading/rocking/remembrance of the late great Goodman. Spur of the event was Clay Eals, whose new book, “Facing the Music,” gives the garrulous Goodman his due—  four pounds worth. The whole affair was in the house at Moe’s Books, Telegraph Ave Berkeley, Monday July 28, 2008.

The seawall along Elizabeth Walk is where I go when I want to lose the claustrophobia.  You see the ships in the harbor, you get the endless cricket green of the Padang; it’s never crowded.  I wander along, just saw a movie at the Capital with Rimmer and Steve.  I’m alone now, walking and smelling the salt and rotting seaweed. Soundtrack plays in my head and I synchronize my steps to it and it carries me along.  “Standing on the cast iron shore yeah,  Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet yeah…looking through a glass onion.”  This jammed up tumble of words is desperate, serious, but odd for sure. The singer just insists on sticking in those “yeahs” even thought there’s no room.  And the the word beat, the emphasis on certain syllables in “looking through a glass onion”  sound like Shakespeare, or a poet speaking in another language. Mr. Leonard tells me a glass onion is a monocle.

Sunday May 25, 2008, Aptos, California. The sixteenth annual Santa Cruz Blues Festival was a bore. The musicians mailed it in, with a few notable exceptions. The staff was irritated and nasty, and the audience was disengaged– no doubt the whole thing has become an automatic walkthrough. Worst: Headliner Al Green’s Vegas act with pumped up arrangements that completely destroyed the spellbinding minimalist character of his 70s hits. Best: The Subdudes. Pure roots and blues artistry, with passionate singing and a glorious mix of woody/steely timbres pouring out of their exquisitely talented fingers.

W the Cecil

Originally uploaded by Monem